


No Good Deed

by raeldaza



Category: Marvel
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Time Travel, more thinking about time travel and that it has CONSEQUENCES
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-11
Updated: 2018-10-11
Packaged: 2019-07-29 06:31:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16258613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raeldaza/pseuds/raeldaza
Summary: Steve’s not happy in the future. Tony gets it in his head that he’ll be a good friend and create a time machine to send Steve back to the 40s.But as time ticks on, and Steve and Tony grow closer, do either of them actually want Steve to use it?





	No Good Deed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [merelydovely](https://archiveofourown.org/users/merelydovely/gifts).



> gifted to you because we’ve been following each forever and I never have written you anything and it feels weird??? also because you mentioned shipping Stony a while ago and it got me back into reading them so this is very tangentially your fault

In retrospect, one of the stranger parts of the whole thing is that Steve never considered it before Tony suggested it.

Just, one day, he’s sitting in the armchair in his living room – a lay-z-boy, a brand that was around even when Steve was still young and scrappy, though he never had one – when Tony arrives in the elevator.

That, in and of itself, isn’t that odd.

It’s Tony’s tower, after all, and he treats it like it is. Not that he’s rude, or at least not in the way the media often paints him, though he does have the rather annoying habit of not checking the time, and almost never taking into consideration that you might be doing something else.

Case in point, the doors to the elevator open, and Tony’s talking before he even steps out. “You’re not happy here, are you?”

Steve sets down his pencil on the coffee table.

“My room is fine, Tony,” he replies. Experience tells him that Tony’s ‘too much’ gene often surfaces with redesign projects – be it hardware, software, building updates, or on one memorable occasion, an attempt at making Steve’s suit camouflage to the background like a chameleon (which, to Tony’s credit, technically worked. The first time Clint put an arrow through his shoulder because he couldn’t see who it was in the woods coincided with the last time Steve wore it).

Tony lifts his head from where he was staring holes into the tablet, looking puzzled. “What are you talking about? Of course your room is fine. You’ve had it for three months. If it wasn’t fine, you would have done something to it by now.” Steve goes to disagree, but Tony’s still talking, flapping his hand. “No. I mean, you’re not happy in this time. In the 21st century.”

The words give Steve pause, the space of a few breaths. He somehow doubts that’s what Tony is really asking. “You’ve all been doing fine—”

“Not what I asked, Cap,” Tony interrupts. “Would you rather be back in the 1940s?”

That is an entirely different question, and one with a far easier answer. “Yes,” Steve says. “But we don’t always get what we want.”

“But yes? You’d trade Obama for FDR?”

Steve’s face contorts. “Well, what do you mean by—”

“Oh for the love of – this is why we’re not closer friends, Spangles. Just confirm it for me, one last time. You’d go back if you had the choice?”

“Yes,” Steve confirms, frankly edging onto bewildered.

“Okay then.” Tony’s head is back down, looking at his tablet, his hand is typing and swiping and manipulating something Steve can’t see. This is another one of Tony’s quirks that Steve has yet to truly get used to – he often forgets that a lot of their conversation happened in his own head. Depending on Steve’s mood, it flits between endearing and irritating.

“What is this about, Tony?”

Tony looks up, slightly startled. But then he shoots Steve a grin – part cocky, part clever, all trouble. “I’m going to do my one good deed for the year,” he replies.

“Meaning?”

“I’m going to send you back.”

* * *

Steve’s a little embarrassed to admit it later, but he spends the next fifteen minutes after that – and there’s no other word for it – interrogating Tony. Tony’s a remarkably good sport about it, despite his eyes widening almost comically when Steve clasped his shoulders and stared him in the eye, or how he leaned back so far to get away from Steve’s touch that he actually tripped over his own foot.

Apparently, Tony spiraled into reading about interdimensional travel after the Battle of New York. One road led to another led to another – “I went so far down that rabbit hole I hit the Earth’s mantle” – and he found himself with a workable theory about traveling to another dimension at a different time period.

“I wasn’t going to explore it,” Tony says during his explanation. “Philosophy and ethics were never my thing. But then there was you – a problem I could fix.”

Steve’s not entirely sure if Tony is calling _him_ a problem or his unhappiness a problem, and he doesn’t want to ask.

The end all be all of the situation highlights itself at the very end of the conversation.

“You can do it?” Steve asks.

“Give me a couple months,” Tony replies. “But yes.”

And that’s that.

* * *

Steve is so anxiously giddy the next couple days that he almost doesn’t know what to do with himself. He’s never been a very effusive person – even in his happiest moments, he knows he has a tendency towards stoicism and a maudlin attitude – but he just can’t _help_ it.

He knows he’s sort of freaking out the team, a little. He came into the gym the other day, a smile wide on his face, and he realizes he’s sort of skipping towards Natasha by the look on her face when he reaches her.

“You okay?” she asks, apprehensive in a way that makes him wonder how he’s looked in the past.

“I’m _great_ ,” he replies.

* * *

The team finds out, of course, and they’re – quietly supportive, Steve decides. He gets a couple pats on the back, a knocked shoulder from Clint, a spirited “I am happy for you” from Thor, and even a nod from Fury.

If he’s surprised no one tries to talk to him about it, he tries not to show it. 

* * *

“Steve,” JARVIS says, interrupting his list making. “Sir requests your presence in the workshop. He needs some of your health information in order to create the machine.”

At that, Steve’s out of his seat like an arrow from a quiver, heading to the basement with a restless, nervous energy that manifests in his hand opening and closing without his permission.

The elevator opens, and there’s Tony, surrounded by his blue holograms that Steve doesn’t truly understand how work. To his credit, though, he doesn’t think _most_ people understand it, so maybe it’s not him being stupid.

“Hi Tony,” he greets.

“Cap,” Tony replies. “Got to get some – what are you holding?”

Steve blinks. He can’t remember. He looks down at his hand, and there’s his notebook, still there.

“Oh,” he says. “I’m making a list of everything I left behind, to catalog what I want to do and who I want to see when I get back. That kind of thing.”

He had a dream last night, a vision, of him arriving back to the camp and surprising Peggy. She’d run into his arms, un-poised like she never was, and he’d catch her. They’d kiss – and the vision morphs into their wedding, the white lace beautiful on her head. Then a house, a couple bedrooms. A small daughter, yellow hair. A dog. A birthday party for their son, where Steve kisses Peggy on the temple. A steady, day job.

“That reminds me – you gotta pick a time to go back. I’m assuming before Barnes died, but that’s your choice.”

The vision that was replaying through his head abruptly dies, replaced by a stone-cold, frozen image of Bucky as he’s falling.

“You—” Steve swallows. “You can send me back before Bucky died?”

“I can take you back as far as Project Rebirth. Not before.”

“Why not before?” he asks, thinking of his mother and her pale, dying skin, so easily saved by modern medicine.

“Fixed point. Somethings are just unchangeable in the universe.”

Tony knows what happened to Bucky. Steve told him one night, on a whim. Tony had been uncharacteristically upset by some event he went to. An old girlfriend (Sunrise? Sunset? Something.) was there, and eventually Steve pried out of him that Tony hadn’t been able to keep more than one steady friend in his whole life.

It wears on a person, which Steve is intimately aware of.

And so he’d shared, and Tony had brushed it off, but in that way that means _thank you_ in Tony language.

It’s a nice memory of Steve’s, but he didn’t really imagine Tony would think about Bucky in all of this.

“You really can send me back where he’s still alive?”

A dam of ideas and futures break open in his head – not letting Bucky go on the mission, he and Bucky drinking together to celebrate the end of the war, Bucky at his wedding, he at Bucky’s, growing old together in the same neighborhood.

“Yep,” Tony says, shrugging it off. “Though keep in mind that’s before you pitched Red Skull and the Tesseract. Also before we won the war. You might have to do some work to make sure that still happens.”

The dam abruptly closes.

“Oh shit,” Steve swears softly. Tony looks back at him, obviously startled. “Sorry, I just – I didn’t think about the war. I’d still have to fight it if I went back before Bucky, huh?”

“Them’s the brakes, kid.”

Steve stuffs the unpleasantness of that thought down, down, down. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all.

“Before Bucky. But just before.”

“You got it.”

“Thank you, Tony,” Steve says, meaning it hard. “This is high-key the best thing anyone has ever done for me.”

Tony laughs a second to himself. “You also might need to add to your ‘going back’ list all the modern sayings that have worked themselves into your vocabulary. Don’t want to go confusing all them 40s folk.”

For the first time, Steve feels a spike of unease.

* * *

The next battle is about three days later when Doom – _Doom,_ why are villains so on the nose? Was he just a huge Tolkien fan? – tries to take down Los Angeles over some anger about a movie that was greenlit about one of his failed attempts at taking down Chicago.

It’s been about an hour, and Steve’s drop kicked a guy down the stairs, punched through about fifteen bots, survived a four story fall, shrugged off a bot to the face, flipped his motorcycle straight into a helicopter (he’s going to have to apologize – it’s the second he’s gone through in as many months), as well as almost snapped someone’s neck with an uncalculatedly strong punch.

He’s feeling pretty good, though.

Natasha’s tech widow bites are _fantastic_ on the bots, and it’s truly fun to watch her acrobatics at getting them on top of them. Clint’s EMP arrows work well too, though he has to watch out for where Tony is, as they learned the hard way.

Steve always enjoys hand to hand combat – but he’s gotta admit, the repulsors cutting through the bots like butter sure make his job to run after Doom easier.

He catches Doom within an hour, and these new magnetic cuffs are _magnificent._ They force his hands together and are completely unable to be taken off without a 14 digit passcode – they also are connected to some kind of device that means Doom physically can’t stray more than five feet from whoever is holding the device.

“Hey, Steve,” Natasha says. They’re both standing a bit away, watching Doom be taken into a SHIELD van. “Do you want to go to the gun range with me soon?”

“I’m not a gun person,” Steve responds, still watching Doom being taken away.

“But the 20th century is. You should get re-used to how the people around you have to fight,” she says.

“Oh.” He looks away from Doom, some of the pleasant-adrenaline draining from his body. “I didn’t think of that."

* * *

“Hey, Steve.”

“What?”

“You know all those biological screenings I did?”

“Yes, as my memory is longer than that of a goldfish.”

“As always, your sense of humor is unparalleled.” The dry tone has Steve barking out a laugh, despite the fact that he, technically, was the one who made a joke. “I’ve been spending the past few days staring at your results, and I think I know why you can’t get drunk.”

“I know why,” Steve replies with a frown. “My cells have a protective system of regeneration and healing.”

“Okay, let me rephrase. Steve, I think I know how to make you get drunk.”

Steve’s feet hit the floor.

“You’ve been looking at it from the angle of ‘how can I find an alcohol strong enough that my body will process slower.' But when I was staring at it, trying to think of how a particle accelerator would interact with your blood, I just got hit by this thought –  why can’t we just reverse that? I can slow down the regeneration process long enough that you can drunk. And now I must try it.”

“Slow the regeneration process? You’re talking about deactivating the serum.”

“Slowing, not deactivating. And it would only target the regeneration process. Basically, you’d just heal slower, more like a normal human. I would highly advise not jumping out airplanes without parachutes while it’s in you – but it’s not going to turn you shrimpy again.”

“It sounds—” Vulnerable. “Risky.”

“It’ll be in a controlled environment. Just me and you, in the lab, my bar with the finest selection. Thor would stand guard, he’s already agreed. Be at a Thursday, middle of the month, 2pm – statistically the least likely time that we’re called out for Avengers business.”

Steve blinks in surprise. “Wait, you calculated that for me?”

Tony breezes right on by. “Which, surprise, is today, in fifteen minutes, so you can’t back out, and there isn’t any chance of it leaking to any baddies.”

“I—” Well, why not. “Okay. I trust you.”

 

Tony scans the drink choices. “I flew in the world’s finest for this. Take your pick.”

Steve considers it. “Do you have French wine?”

“Basic bitch, I like it,” Tony says, then rolls his eyes at whatever face Steve is pulling. “No offense meant. It’s a saying.”

“One we could probably do without,” Steve points out, and Tony shrugs in either agreement or disagreement – Steve can never tell.

Tony pulls out a wine glass from the bar, and a wine bottle follows. “Why the choice?” Tony asks.

Steve hesitates. The reason is awfully personal – but it’s not a secret, so whatever. “When Bucky died—” Tony noticeably stills, though he doesn’t look up. “I tried to get drunk in a bar off French wine. I couldn’t, of course. Seems like it’s only fitting.”

Steve expects to have to explain why it’s fitting, but Tony simply raises the glass, in a mock toast, and says, “To righting the past’s wrongs.”

The one glass turns into two, then into a whiskey, then into a rum, then into some mix that Steve spits most of onto the floor, then a margarita, then something else that he’s sure Tony is making up the name of, then Steve can no longer sit up totally straight on his own.

“Your pouring skills are revolting,” he tells Tony, over two hours and about nine conversations later, grinning wide.

“Your tolerance is revolting,” Tony shoots back, also grinning. Also drunk.

“My tolerance, _thank you so much,_ is the best in the world.”

“You’re drunk at like four pm in the afternoon, most people call that a sign of alcoholism.”

And then they’re off again – this time talking about the way people drank in the war, and moving on, somehow, to the anatomy of camels (there was some connection there – drunk person handling a camel carrying supplies, camel broke shit? Steve can no longer remember. It was Tony’s story, after all).

All of a sudden, exhaustion weighs in. He lays his head on the table, cradling it in between his arms. “When do my cells—” the proper word is alluding him, up in the ether of his mind that his drunkenness is currently clouding. Whatever, it’s too many syllables. “Come back?”

“Give it another half hour or so,” Tony responds. He’s resting his chin on his hand. His eyes are starting to look glazed.

“Hey. Tony.”

“Mhm.”

Steve’s drunk enough to consider grabbing his hand for emphasis, but still aware enough to think better of it. “Thanks for this.”

“Glad you had fun, Captain oh Captain. Captain Ahab. Or was it Captain Ishmael? Oh God, I don’t remember. JARVIS—”

Tony continues on, but Steve’s mind sticks onto that one word – fun.

Not because it isn’t accurate, but because it is.

* * *

That night seems to open up a door that Steve didn’t even know existed – the door leading to Tony.

Tony had always been a bit untouchable, in his mind. He’d never say it, especially because he thinks Tony would be offended by the association, but he’s always sort of associated Tony with the Vatican. Beautiful, impressive, integral to how he lives his life – but not something he’ll ever see from the inside, or how it functions.

But apparently that was an unfounded assumption, because, he learns that if he asks, Tony always says yes.

The first time, Steve wanted to ask Tony how to find out if his favorite current restaurant existed in any form back in the 40s (it didn’t – it started in 1971). The second time, Steve was wondering if he could see the MOMA before he left, because he wanted to see all the art before he was back to living before they were made. The third time – well, his reasons get stupider and stupider, until it can’t be described as anything other than just, well, _hanging out._

He’s not sure if they would have gotten along all that well if they weren’t living in the same space and continually trusting the other with their lives – but, in the end, it doesn’t matter.

Steve, for the first time in a long time, has a best friend.

And Tony, for the first time in a long time, has a best friend who is present.

They don’t really do all that much, when Steve really thinks about it. Just talk.

But Tony sure does like to talk, and Steve sure does like to listen. And when it goes the other way – well, Steve often walks away with his heart noticeably pounding, and a smile that’s softer than it is joyful.

* * *

They talk a lot about what’s going to happen after.

* * *

“All this accumulation of knowledge,” Tony says one day, when they’re watching WALL-E. Steve is trying to make it through all of the Pixar movies. “You now could write like, 70 years of entertainment.”

“Oh.” It never occurred to him. “I couldn’t recreate it, though. I don’t have the talent even if I know the basics.”

“But you’ll know it,” Tony counters.

“Yeah.” A thought goes across his mind. “I’ll never be able to discuss any current media with anyone. They won’t follow.”

“On the plus side, you could make your friends insanely jealous with your guessing of plot skills.”

Tony’s just obliviously munching on some bizarre popcorn – why does he insist on finding strange, Whole Foods versions of food? Why does popcorn need to be vegan and gluten free? – while Steve is having a miniature existential crisis a cushion away.

“Oh my God, I’ll never know the ending to the new Star Wars franchise.”

“Yes, you will,” Tony laughs, eyes still on WALL-E. “In like eighty years.”

Somehow, that doesn’t make Steve feel any better.

* * *

“Tony.”

Tony’s actually in the creation stage, now. The machine looks a little bit like an incubator. “What?”

He’s obviously distracted, focusing on some wiring, not the best time to ask an ethical dilemma question – but Steve just can’t keep it to himself anymore.

“Do you think – am I morally responsible to stop some of the bad that has happened between the 40s and now? Warn people? I’m a time traveling status symbol, they’ll probably believe me. Should I bring back vaccines? Stop the Rwanda genocide? Warn people about Hurricane Katrina ahead of time? Do something about the housing crisis? Save people from plane crashes?”

Tony stops and straightens. He flips his goggles to the top of his head. His spiky, brown hair fills them, and something about it sort of makes Steve ache.

“Steve,” he starts. “No. There’s too much. You can’t fix everything. There will always be one more thing, one more bad. You can’t put that kind of responsibility on yourself, you'll never get a break. Plus, there’s the ripple effect you have to watch out for, so that stopping one bad doesn’t lead to something worse.”

“But ethically—”

“If you hold yourself responsible for everything you could have but didn’t change, you’ll drive yourself mad.”

That, Steve thinks, knowing himself, may be the whole problem.

* * *

 “PTSD.”

“Oh. There’s a name.”

“Yeah, Steve,” Tony laughs. “There’s a name. There are some treatments for that you may be able to bring back with you. Probably won’t find a therapist for a while, though.”

* * *

Steve asks, but only once.

“What about what I change? Won’t the timeline—”

“Multi-verse theory,” Tony dismisses. He doesn’t even look up. “You don’t alter this timeline. When you leave, it’ll just be as if you disappeared. When you go back, you create an alternate timeline – an alternate universe. The future you create there is the only one that existed for that universe.”

Steve has no reason not to believe him, though he thinks about it often afterwards.

* * *

Another thing Steve asks, but only once.

“Will anyone else use the machine after me?”

Tony shakes his head. “It’s too dangerous. I’m destroying it immediately after. I’m also not writing any of the plans down. When I go,” he knocks on his head. “Then it’s gone.”

“But what about you?” Steve presses. The blue light of the arc reactor is shining through Tony’s shirt. “There isn’t anything you’d go back and prevent from happening?”

Tony – verbose, loquacious, effusive Tony – looks him right in the eye and replies, “No.”

Steve thinks of that often, too. 

* * *

“What’s the plan for the team after I go?”

“Natasha takes over as team leader. She’s best with the plans.”

“She’s awfully—” Steve doesn’t want to say this wrong. “Self-focused,” he ends up choosing. “It’s not that she’s not a team player, but—”

“Yeah, she knows,” Tony agrees. “But what else are we going to do?”

* * *

One night, after he and Tony spend over six hours together, Steve goes back to his room and cries into his pillow for the first time in four months.

* * *

The next day, he goes to SHIELD for a change of pace. And face.

“Sharon,” he greets warmly.

“Steve!” She throws her arms around his neck. “Wow, it’s been a while.”

“A bit, yeah,” he agrees, feeling a little bad.

“Give me a second – I have to deliver this form upstairs. Want to come?”

He nods, and they set off. On the way, she gets stopped by three different men – one asking her when their training session is, one congratulating her on her promotion, and one telling her that her idea for new software was going to be adopted.

She thanks the last two, and Steve finds himself smiling at her, without thinking about it.

“What?” Sharon asks, tucking some hair behind her ear.

“Oh,” Steve shakes his head. “Nothing. Just – Peggy would have been so proud of you.”

He can see the surprise on her face, just for a moment, and then it’s gone. “Steve,” she says, a strange note in her voice. “She was.”

The vision Steve has had of Peggy’s future morphs and reshapes – the very slow, but tangible progress for women that Peggy scraped and fought for; Peggy's triumphant face when SHIELD allows female agents; Peggy smiling at Gabe; children playing; Peggy’s laugh as she receives her promotion; posing for her portrait in SHIELD headquarters; shaking her head at Howard with her hand in Tony’s; patting a young, blonde niece on the head; watching Cheers with her head on Gabe’s shoulder; her clapping extra hard as Sharon’s badge is pinned for the first time – and this vision stays.

* * *

“Jeanine at the coffee shop says hello,” Tony tells him, when Steve returns from SHIELD.

“I’m sorry I missed her.”

“She was too – she invited us both to her wedding. She and her to-be-wife apparently are funding the whole thing on our tips, so it only felt right, in her words.”

Steve finds himself pausing mid-step.

“Her wife?”

“Yeah,” Tony confirms, distracted.

Steve wonders when the next time he’ll hear those words are.

Tony looks up, apparently surprised by Steve’s silence. “What?”

“Nothing.” Steve shakes his head, and Tony looks back down at his tablet. “I guess it’s just nice to hear people are in love.”

“The world loves love,” Tony says, apparently without thinking, because his eyes are completely focused and scanning the text on his screen.

“Have you ever been in love?”

His eyes halt.

“Uh – occasionally.”

“Really?” Steve asks. “More than once?”

Tony shrugs.

“Is it easy to make you fall in love? What’s it take?”

After a few truly painfully quiet moments, “Attention,” Tony says at last. “Effort made towards me. Attention. Spending time with me and liking it. Doesn’t take a lot.”

“If it’s easy, it seems like it could be taken advantage of,” Steve muses.

Tony shuts off his tablet. “It does, doesn’t it.”

* * *

The next day, Tony asks for entrance to Steve’s bedroom.

That is odd.

Steve agrees, bemusedly. Tony walks in – his hair is sticking up, his eyes are slightly red, and he’s walking fairly sluggishly – all signs he hasn’t really been sleeping.

“Are you okay?” Steve asks, concerned.

“What’s your favorite thing to eat?” Tony asks out of nowhere.

“What are you – what?”

“One last meal. Make it good, you’re going back to terrible food.”

Something icy is starting to spread through Steve.

“It’s ready?”

“Last night, I made the last update I really could make without having to resort to like, putting a coffee maker in it. So yeah. It’s ready.”

It takes a moment for Steve to identify the emotion that’s seeping throughout him. But he gets there.

It’s dread.

He doesn’t know what to say. _Thank you_ seems underwhelming and far too much all at once.

“Finished your good deed for the year, huh?” he ends up saying, which feels wrong coming off his lips.

Tony shoots him a brittle grin. “No good deed. Axioms are always right in the end.”

* * *

Steve asks to skip the final dinner. He just can’t imagine having to sit there with all his teammates, his friends, knowing he won’t do it again.

He’s written them all goodbye letters that he know will be delivered after he goes.

He’s also painfully aware of the irony – all he ever wanted, before, was the opportunity to say goodbye to what he’d lost. And now that he has the opportunity, he’s too much of a coward to face doing it, to face anyone.

But then there’s Tony.

He has to be there; he’s working the machine. He has to be the last sight Steve sees before he’s whisked away. He has to look him in the eye.

It’s the kind of goodbye that’s going to hit, right where it hurts, over and over and over.

“I wish you could come,” Steve says, as they’re preparing the machine.

He doesn’t mean it. Tony would _hate_ the past. A man of the future through and through, he’d lose his mind having to remake the steps of progress.

But he does _want_ him there. He just doesn’t _wish_ him there.

“Nah. Just put me in the list of things you’ve left behind.”

Tony continues tinkering with wires Steve cannot see.

Steve raises a hand to his mouth, closing his eyes. The words hurt, in a way he’s sure Tony didn’t intend, but it brings to the forefront of his mind the thought he’s been trying not to have – he has so much to mourn, after this.

Tony stands up. He’s oddly subdued, none of his normal energy.

“Ready?” he asks. He’s still and quiet, no smile, no joy.

Steve can’t back out now. After all the time, effort, money, and thought Tony has put into this? To just step aside and say, hm, how about I _don’t_ use this thing you just spent the last two months of your life perfecting, just for me? _No thanks! I’m good!_

He steps into the machine.

“Just pull the lever to your right, and it’ll go,” Tony says.

“Tony—”

“No goodbyes,” he interrupts. “None of that. Just – good luck.”

Steve nods. He can give Tony that, at least.

His hand is on the lever now. He just – he can’t bring himself to pull it.

Tony’s staring at the lever, hyper-focused, and Steve realizes with a burst of clarity something he already kind of knew, like putting a video from 240px to 1080px – that Tony doesn’t want this either. But neither of them are going to say a word. Tony's always been far too willing to sacrifice himself, his own happiness.

As for Steve, stubbornness was always his biggest fault.

Is he going to let a character flaw lose his life, when he can stop it? Is he going to let pride take everything from him – and for no reason?

That first question comes back, Tony’s voice echoing in his mind.

_“Would you rather be back in the 1940s?"_

To think he had thought that was an easier question to answer than _Are you happy?_

But, perhaps, it still is.

He lets go of the lever.

“Please don’t make me do this.”

Tony sags, his chin dropping to his chest. “Please,” Tony says, almost at a beg. “Don’t have said that for me. Don’t stay for me.”

“I’m staying for me,” Steve says, stepping out of the machine. He's calm, now. Heartbeat slowed, confident steps. This - this was the right choice. He can feel it. 

Tony looks up – hope is there, clearly, but something else too – maybe defiance.

“I will _not_ be the reason you’ve lost everything, once again.”

“Tony. You’re the reason I’ve _gained_ everything.”

Steve walks up to Tony, who is still staring at him, expression unreadable.

“You’re really going to stay?” Tony’s voice isn’t wavering. Always brave, he was.

“I’m really going to stay.”

Tony shuts his eyes. Steve feels the utterly overwhelming compulsion to hug him – so he does just that, pulling him forward, and placing Tony’s head on his shoulder.

“See if I make you any custom designs again,” Tony says into his shirt, words muffled.

Steve laughs, and squeezes harder.

Tony lets it go on for a few more moments, then pulls back. His eyes are bright.

“Okay. You're staying. But, hey, maybe we could send a butterfly back? And then like, one of us could go into the future and see what’s changed. Just think of the science on a _literal_ butterfly effect—”

Steve kicks at something that looks important, and the left side of the machine caves in with a crash.

“Hey,” Tony protests mildly.

“For the best.”

“Yeah, probably.” Tony sends a look of longing to the machine. “It was such a masterpiece of invention, though.”

“For the best,” Steve repeats.

He finds himself unable to contain his smile. He’s happy – giddy, almost, the relief almost an aphrodisiac, with how good he feels right now.

Tony’s still looking at him, calculated now. Steve goes to ask something smart, like _what,_ when Tony says, “Now that you’re staying – do you want to go to dinner with me? I’m bad at dates, but I’ve been reliably informed by the Internet and my memories of movies that came out in the 90s that that’s a pretty standard first date thing. Though I was pretty wasted most of the 90s, so, who knows.”

Steve’s heart picks up a few extra beats a minute.

He finds that he doesn’t know what to say – yes, somehow, isn’t coming off his tongue yet, and he finds himself responding, “What, just like that?”

“Just like that." Tony nods. "Though, I’d just kick you out of the tower if you say no.”

Steve spends a second on that one, turning it over. “No, you wouldn’t.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Tony concedes. “Though I’d probably kick myself out.”

“Better say yes, then. Can be my good deed of the year.”

“Do not,” Tony laughs, full and real. “Say that.”

**Author's Note:**

> April 2019 (spoilery?) edit: I wrote this last year and like it far better now that Endgame is out. Just saying.


End file.
